The Old Testament offers a model for how to restore community and economic life after disaster.
In all likelihood, in the history of the 2020s, COVID-19 will be a footnote. When our great-grandchildren think about the 2020s, they will probably remember the pandemic just as little as we—until last March—remembered the Spanish flu of 1918–1919.
Pandemics and other natural disasters are rarely history-shaping events by themselves. Instead, natural disasters accelerate and intensify cultural realities and trends.
This is why my Praxis colleagues and I wrote a piece in March 2020 arguing that the lasting “ice age,” the long-term effects of COVID-19, would be more about economy than epidemiology. The little ice age would not so much be the twelve to eighteen months of pandemic “winter” itself but the dislocation and social change that would be left behind.
Today we see three major dislocations, not caused by the pandemic but accelerated by it, that should shape the horizon of Christian action in the next decade.
First, the K-shaped recovery.
We speculated last spring about whether the economic recovery would be V- or U- or L-shaped, but in fact it has been K-shaped. Some asset classes, like large public equities, have done incredibly well. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of small businesses that were viable before the pandemic have closed entirely.
Work has been K-shaped. Almost no one enjoyed this past year, but if you could work from home with screens and words and symbols, it was a lot more bearable and doable than if you worked away from home with people or with things.
Even within companies, there are K-shaped dynamics. As Sequoia Capital wrote in March, “We’re seeing a difference between how business metrics are performing and how many people in those companies are feeling.” …